Running With Ivan, page 18
‘Tell me,’ I said.
Mr Livingston gave me a soft smile. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course. But where exactly to start: that is the question.’
In front of us, the oval was newly mown and green from the weekend rain.
‘A lap?’ he suggested. ‘For me, conversation has always come easier when I am moving — a legacy, perhaps, of our cart-carrying days at Theresienstadt.’
So we walked. Side by side, we walked around the oval.
‘It was a strange time, immediately following our liberation. After you left more people came to Theresienstadt, mostly from Poland. They had the most terrible stories to tell. Worse than you had told me, much worse. I thought they were mad, or lying, so I stopped listening. Then one of those people came up to me. He’d been acquainted with my father, he said, and needed to tell me something. If I’d known what he was about to say, I wouldn’t have listened; I would have just walked away.’
He stopped then, stopped still. We both did. ‘Do you know what he told me?’
A weight pressed on my chest. ‘No.’
‘That he’d been taken to Auschwitz, and had seen my father there, just ahead of him. When he’d called out to him, my father had turned.’
I flinched. ‘And then?’
Mr Livingston looked straight at me. ‘They were in the same line, my father and this man. There were officers at the front of the line, SS officers, and they were directing people to the left or to the right. My father, the man told me, was sent to the left.’
I wanted to cry. ‘Are you certain?’
Sadness danced on Mr Livingston’s lips. ‘If I am to believe what he told me, then yes, I’m certain. The ones who were sent to the right — like this man — were saved, and the ones who were sent to the left — like my father — were not.’
I felt the prickling of tears. When they spilt over and ran down my face, Mr Livingston put a hand on my shoulder. He did not cry. Instead he began to walk again. We both did.
‘After the liberation, we heard there were flights to England. If you were an orphan and you were under sixteen, you could go to live in England. I was an orphan, it seemed, and somehow I managed to pass for fifteen, so that’s how I was chosen.’
I frowned. ‘An orphan?’
‘Yes, an orphan. My father was gone, it seemed, and from my mother I’d heard nothing. Nothing at all. Others were being reunited through the Red Cross, but no one came for me. So I thought if I went to England, I could try to find her, although I wasn’t sure she’d actually made it there.’ He swallowed. ‘But I went to England anyway. A group of us was taken by plane, in a Lancaster bomber, if you can believe it. Imagine that, the aircraft that had bombed Germany to pieces was now flying us right away from it all! We were taken to a place called Windermere, where there was a room for each of us and as much food as we could eat. It was a beautiful place, out in the country, although none of us was really in a state to properly appreciate it. But to make a long story shorter, it was in Windermere that my mother found me: my mother who had been Greta Mandl in Prague, but who, by birth, was Margaret Livingston.’
I looked up. ‘Livingston?’
‘Yes, Livingston: a name she reclaimed when she returned to England. Anyone with a German-sounding name was best rid of it, which meant Mandl had to go. So it was Margaret Livingston — not Greta Mandl — who arrived at Windermere to claim me as her son. Her stepson, to be exact, but after all the years that have passed, this seems a poor description. She was my mother. I was her son. And because of how things were, it seemed logical to take her name — the name of Livingston — and to become an English boy. More than an English boy, as it turned out: an English athlete, can you believe it?’
He tilted his head in my direction. ‘There are very few things for which I must thank Theresienstadt, but perhaps running is one of them. Do you remember how we ran? How we ran and ran? Of course you do! It is not nearly so long ago for you as it is for me. And still I remember it, this running. It helped me to survive my time in that awful place. Truly it did. And later the running saved me again. I was almost eighteen when my mother took me to London with her. My English was reasonable but not outstanding and I had a strong accent that marked me as a German speaker. That made it difficult to find friends at school, especially when my classmates were all younger than me. This was for good cause: so I could catch up on my schooling and improve my English. But it was not easy. So my mother encouraged me to train. Her reasoning for this was commendable: when I was running it no longer mattered if I spoke English with an accent. All that mattered was that I could run, and fast. So I ran fast. And as I became faster, I began to achieve some success. For me, it was the beginning of a better life.
‘In those first years after the war, I kept hoping my father’s acquaintance had been mistaken, that it had not been my father he had seen being marched to his death, that it had been someone else instead. But my father never came back. Later, we found out that our driver, Mr Krahl, had been the one to betray him. He had informed the Germans of our hidden radio; he had secured my father’s arrest. What, I wondered, had my father done to deserve this? Still it baffles me that he should have been betrayed in such a way. And still I can’t quite believe he is gone. Even now, old man that I am, I think he might suddenly appear before me. Much like you did, my friend.’
He went quiet, as if to gather himself. ‘But if my father’s absence is something I have never really accepted,’ he continued, ‘I have at least learnt to live with it. For this, I have my mother to thank. She became everything to me: mother and father, friend and confidante. Everything I had lost, she became. Her country even became my country and that was where I stayed until many years later when she, too, died and again I lost a mother. Afterwards, I sought the sunshine, so I travelled south. Which is how I found myself in your country, Leo.’
Turning towards me, he spread out his hands. ‘And when you first came to training — when I knew it was you but saw you had no idea it was me — how I wanted to reveal myself to you. You were such a sad boy, Leo. Of course there was a sadness about you in Theresienstadt, but we were all sad there, and this made it harder to recognise the sadness in others. So when you came to training that first time, I saw what I had missed before: your grief. What you needed, I knew then, was not more confusion in your life, but simply a friend, even a mentor. So I decided not to tell you. I decided to simply train you instead, to make of you the best runner you could be and let the past melt away.’
I was struggling to take it all in, struggling to make sense of it. ‘And Olinda? What happened to Olinda?’
He smiled. It was a gentle, sad smile. ‘Hers is a happy tale, at least in part. After the liberation, she too was reunited with her mother.’
I looked over at him. ‘So she lived?’
He nodded. ‘Against the odds, she lived. Her father died but her mother lived. Such sadness and such happiness, all thrown in together. The last I heard, Olinda and her mother were hoping to emigrate. To Canada or America, or even, perhaps, to Israel.’
‘The last you heard?’
His eyes were clouded now. ‘Those were times of great confusion and it was not easy to keep in contact. I did not know where I would be going, so I had no address, and for Olinda and her mother, it was the same. As you well know, Leo, communication then was not like it is now: it was easier to lose people and harder to find them.’
He paused. ‘I did try to find her,’ he said finally. ‘I did try but I was not successful. You know, even now, all these years later, still I think of her. I imagine her singing. Sometimes I even wake to her voice.’ His voice wavered and for a moment, I thought it might break. Instead, it just became softer. ‘I do miss her. I still miss her.’
For some time, we walked in silence. Then he stopped. ‘This talk of Olinda has reminded me,’ he said. ‘There is something I have been keeping for you. Something I have wanted you to have.’
He unstrapped his watch and handed it to me. It wasn’t a new watch. It was an old one. Very old. And when I looked at the back of it, I saw it was engraved. Engraved with German words. Familiar words, I realised with a shock, words I’d read before. For Martin, they said, from Greta, with love.
‘Your father’s watch,’ I said.
‘Yes. My father’s watch. Every day my mother wore it. As though she was just minding it for him and was waiting for the day he would come for it. But he never did, and so, eventually, the watch became mine instead.’
‘I can’t take it from you,’ I murmured.
‘Yes you can,’ he replied, his voice firm. ‘It is to replace the watch you gave away, the one you gave for Olinda. So take it. Please take it.’
We’d stopped where we’d begun, at the curved starting line of the track, a small smile lighting his face. I nodded, returning his smile as I strapped the watch around my wrist. ‘It’s becoming late,’ he reminded me, ‘and if we don’t start training soon, you will never be ready for the nationals.’
With that, he switched back to English. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I need four laps. No, not four. Six. Six of them. Full speed.’
And when I didn’t move quickly enough, when I stopped to run a finger over the watch — to check it was still there, to check it was properly fastened — he became impatient.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked. ‘Run, Leo, run.’
Author’s Note
I could never have written Running with Ivan were it not for Fred (Bedřich) Perger, my landlord and neighbour, who also became my close friend.
Born in Prague in 1923, as a teenager Fred had been sent to the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt, where he stayed for eighteen months before being transported to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau.
After we’d been neighbours for some years, Fred agreed to tell me his wartime story in detail. Because he had a close to photographic memory, he was able to describe his life with remarkable precision. For over a year we sat down once a week to record the interviews I later transcribed. During this time, Fred answered all my questions, no matter how difficult or personal and, in the end, the transcript ran to over two hundred pages. It was the most invaluable tool and extraordinary gift when I came to write Running with Ivan.
Fred married his childhood sweetheart, Eva Fischerová, who, like him, had been sent to Theresienstadt as a teenager and later to Auschwitz. Against the odds, they both survived and were reunited once the war was over. Their two daughters, my friends Helena and Renata, were born in Prague before the family fled to Australia in 1968 to make a new life in Sydney.
A portrait of Fred as an eight-year-old boy had been held in safekeeping during the war and later found its way to Fred and Eva’s house in Sydney. The well-dressed child in the portrait holds himself with a confidence I’ve always found intriguing. In this portrait I found my inspiration for Ivan Mandl.
Leo Arnold came from a very different place. Combining families to make a new one is not always easy and, through Leo, I wanted to explore how challenging such a change might be. In creating Leo, I drew on the experiences of friends and family who sought a place for themselves within the strangeness of a new family.
Fred and his childhood friend, Honza, were on the same transport to Auschwitz. Of everything Fred told me, it was his friendship with Honza that most moved me. Whenever he spoke of Honza, I would think of the two of them crowded together in that awful train carriage. From there, I’d reflect on the power of friendship and what, if anything, I’d be prepared to do to save a friend. Unsure of the answer, it was a challenge I handed, instead, to Leo.
From Fred came other heart-stopping vignettes that found their way into Running with Ivan. The milk injection was inspired by Fred’s account of how Eva’s father, a surgeon also interned in Theresienstadt, had saved Fred from an earlier transport to Auschwitz. (Please note that injecting milk is a dangerous procedure and can make you extremely ill, so please don’t try it.) The betrayal of Ivan’s father had its genesis in a similar betrayal of Fred’s own father. The idea that a person might manage to evade a transport, even at the very last minute, came from Fred’s description of how, while in Theresienstadt, his parents had been assembled to board a transport on which they’d been included. With Fred’s encouragement, they distanced themselves from the crowd, the transport left without them and they returned to life in Theresienstadt. This story inspired me to consider what might have been possible for Leo and Ivan.
The enormity of the Holocaust makes it almost impossible to comprehend. Mindful of this, I wanted to bring an immediacy to wartime Europe when writing Running with Ivan. That is why Leo — a boy from the twenty-first century with little understanding of the war and its impact — needed to find himself dropped right into the middle of it. Only then could he begin to understand what actually happened. This is what makes time travel such a powerful writer’s tool.
Although my friend, Fred Perger, is no longer alive, his voice has stayed with me over the years, most especially when I came to write Running with Ivan. As I fashioned my story of Ivan and Leo, I’d think often of Fred, and that light smile he’d wear each time we stopped to chat before returning to his life story.
Acknowledgements
Fred Perger and Eva Perger (née Fischerová) introduced me to the ghetto of Theresienstadt that had been their wartime prison, and the stories they told me breathed life into Ivan, Olinda and Leo. Over the years of our friendship, Fred and Eva became as family for me and I am so grateful for the continuing love and friendship of their family, Helena, Renata, Bob, Michael, Caroline and Nicole.
My clever, kind and ever-supportive literary agent, Margaret Connolly, celebrates with me when things are good and props me up whenever my confidence falters. It was an especially good day — one of the best days ever, in fact — when Margaret told me that Lisa Berryman was interested in acquiring the manuscript for HarperCollins.
My heart leapt when Lisa Berryman rang to tell me how much she loved the manuscript and how excited she was to be publishing it. Not nearly as excited as I was, though! With wisdom and encouragement, Lisa carefully reshaped Running with Ivan, giving the book its title and sprinkling magic through its pages. I have loved working with you, Lisa, and can’t thank you enough for your advice and support.
Many thanks to Jim Demetriou for welcoming me as a HarperCollins author — and for my special signing pen. Kate O’Donnell is the most incisive editor and it has been my greatest pleasure to work on the manuscript with her. I am grateful to my inhouse editors, Eve Tonelli, Angie Masters and Siobhán Cantrill, for their expertise and support; to Pamela Dunne for once again being the most scrupulous proofreader; to Hope McConnell, Mark Campbell and the HarperCollins design team for the exquisite cover and to Maraya Bell, Emma Holifield and the rest of the marketing and publicity teams for sending Running with Ivan out into the world.
I was the recipient of a Varuna Residential Fellowship for an early draft of Running with Ivan which gave me precious time to write.
My heartfelt thanks to Tom Keneally, Ursula Dubosarsky, Sophie Masson and James Moloney for taking the time to read Running with Ivan and for their wonderful words of support. I’m grateful to Bram Presser for his careful and thoughtful consideration of the manuscript, to Cristina Huesch for checking my German and to Susanne Gervay for her kind words. David Barrow and Alex Leal Smith were, once more, my careful and encouraging early readers.
My colleague and friend Frank Marks introduced me to his wife, Rose Fekete, whose mother, Marianne Van Der Poorten, had been interned in Theresienstadt and who generously read an early draft of my manuscript. I thank both Rose Fekete and Marianne Van Der Poorten for their support and am saddened that they aren’t here to celebrate the publication of Running with Ivan with me.
Zdenka Fantlová, author of the beautiful book, The Tin Ring, was an inmate of Theresienstadt until 1944 when she was sent to, and later liberated from, Bergen-Belsen. Zdenka generously read an early manuscript of Running with Ivan and invited me to her house in London where she showed me — and let me try on — the tin ring her fiancé had fashioned for her in Theresienstadt.
As a teenager, my mother, Roslyn Leal, worked fulltime during the day and studied at night to become a teacher, a career she loved. I thank her for always making my education — and that of my brother, David — her priority.
I am so proud of my four children. Alex, Dominic, Xavier and Miranda, I revel in your company, your conversations, your terrific sense of humour and your closeness to one another.
David Barrow is a fabulous human being and I still can’t believe I get to have him as my husband. Thank you, sweetheart, for everything.
Finally, my special thanks to you, my readers.
About the Author
SUZANNE LEAL is the author of novels The Teacher’s Secret, Border Street and The Deceptions, for which she won the Nib People’s Choice Prize and was shortlisted for the Davitt Awards and the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award. A senior member of the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal and facilitator at community, corporate and literary events, Suzanne is the host of Thursday Book Club, a relaxed, friendly book club connecting readers online.
www.suzanneleal.com
Praise for Running with Ivan
‘Young readers will catch their breath as they hurtle through the pages of this pulsing time-travel adventure about two boys who love to run. A unique and unexpected friendship between Leo and Ivan reaches across a dark gulf of history where the stakes couldn’t be higher, and they both, in their own ways, find themselves running for their lives. Past meets present on equal terms in this dramatic, big-hearted story, told with all of Suzanne Leal’s characteristic wisdom and tenderness.’
